Absence is the mirror of the past. That Mirror presents us with what is no longer there. Absence is also synonymous with lack. We are experts in running away from what reminds us of our empty spaces. We see it as danger and do everything we can so that this lack does not reveal itself right before our eyes.

If we use the mirror to see the face of the past we will never accept the presence of who we are now. That presence is perfect even despite the shortcomings that our ego persists in covering up.

Accepting the absence is the first step to transform it into presence. Opening your eyes to absence empowers you with the fire to manifest abundance.

If you have been abandoned, if your parents weren’t in your life, if your partner left, don’t fight that absence. Accept It: don’t be the one who gives up on yourself.

If you lost a loved one, don’t close your eyes. Open them so more tears can clear up your horizon. Don’t run from your emotions. Accept the absence: don’t be the one who dies.

If you lost a job, your honor, your credibility, get up on your dreams, find the flame, defend your passion. Get up on the voices that tell you that you’re not enough. Accept the failure: be the one who recovers the faith in yourself.

The past is like a sine wave that shows us the constant state of flux between light and darkness.

What is needed in your life is Yourself. Don’t be afraid of your colors, recognize the shape of your petals and the scent that emanates from your loving presence. Nobody else can contribute to the world with what you bring.

Let’s use the mirror of the present to see the reflection of our light, fearlessly.

We talk about death with a certain modesty, as if we do not want to be heard that we mention her. We have learned that dying must be a cause of suffering.

Fear, pain and hopelessness come from the idea of death as a total emptiness. This idea emanates from the mind that clings to separating us from everything that exists. The mind says “if I die, I disappear”.

Perhaps death is only a space for peace, an empty space that accepts the light, which embraces the life that is born at every moment. Thus, the spirit affirms before the mind, lovingly “I do not die, I dissolve in Unity”.

Perhaps all those tears, pain, suffering, guilt and frustration for the unexpressed, are ways in which life gives us eyes to see that within the

dark,
cold and
silent earth

Also the flowing life is gestated,
the seed is broken,
the space is opened so that
the flower begins its return journey.

A flower knows herself a flower when she trusts that her opening reveals the skies to her eyes of seed and pollen. She acknowledges vulnerability yet never tells herself stories of death and failure. She rest assured her journey in life is a poem that bees sing to the moon and the sun imprints on the colors of butterflies.

A flower knows she’s ready to be color reflected in the dew while she talks to the mantis and the mountain and she kisses the gaze of hummingbirds.

She welcomes storms and calmness and nourishes from darkness of the earth to then transform into light at waking surface. She knows no fight, she rather integrates and travels through her petals in the wind and her seeds returning to the womb.

A flower trusts the path presents itself as life unplanned and miraculously uncertain.

Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. We all make them. They repeat one after another, unceasingly looking to reach our eyes who run away from the gift of motion.

Fear of mistakes comes from our minds who try to convince us that it is best to let our lakes still, our atmosphere empty and our flowers covered by the security of false eternity.

The steps of the traveller may take him to a place where he feels lost and cold. The fear then comes along bringing the dense fog of sadness, anger and pain.

That fear, however, is not the fear of going wrong.

The real fear comes from the realization that there is no difference between walker and path: they are the same thing.

You are the only path you will ever know. Others have to know theirs. When you look outside you see mistakes. When you look inside you see masters, your inner master who tells you to follow your truth, your intuition.

The flower essence affirmation of Cerato (Ceratostigma willmottiana) by Patricia Kaminsky describes beautifully the vibration of this flower who speaks of inner masters and the light of our very own Truth:

“I learn to listen to my own voice.I trust my inner knowing.I find the confidence to follow what is right for me.My light is a source of Truth for others.”

Romantic relationships are opportunities where life allows us to find in the other a mirror to take a look inside ourselves. Self-knowledge implies diving into the depths of our inner oceans in order to stop speculating about theories of love and start instead experiencing the reality of opening our hearts to the possibility of being vulnerable.

Theoretical love, the perfect one, the one where nobody ever gets into inner battles, is dead, already, in the sterile territories of the mind. Experimental love, the one that risks to open to a world of uncertainties, the one of light and darkness, of magic and delusions, is alive and seeks for opening its flowers into the ever-green forests of the heart.

Sometimes love stories start and sometimes love stories end. Some do it suddenly while others slowly fade away. All of them hurt, even when the mind denies pain by searching for the one to blame or by building immediate logical structures under which Ego feels safe.

The truth is that the heart was the one who dared to try and the heart is indestructible: nobody can break it. Even if it seems to bleed, blood means life containing the alchemical fire ready to transform everything.

The optimal conditions in your life are happening here and now. “How it should be” is exactly as it is in this moment. Wishing that something could have been different is to deny ourselves the precious jewels offered by life itself so that we can realize we came into this world to love in order to learn how to love.

The flower essence of Bleeding Heart (Dicentra Formosa) of Flower Essence Services (FES), is commonly used for “broken hearts” and it helps the soul to expand towards the search of inner love, which means love for others and ultimately love for life. Below I share the flower affirmation for Bleeding Heart, by Patricia Kaminsky:

To sow a seed is an act of love, however, your love does not guarantee you will see its flowers blooming. It may be that you pour on it too much water. It may be that you do not pour enough water on it. It may be too that after a hurricane you manage to see all its flowers. The only certainty you have is that you do not know if you would ever see your seed becoming a bloom.

You may simply cover it with soil and wait for the sun to bring its warmth, for the moon to cradle its dreams, for the sky to water it with its showers and for the earth to nurture it with its blood.

Thus, it is in the attempt, not in the consequence, when we make room inside our hearts for life to occur as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Because the all-controlling mind is the one who needs to think of the result, while the all-loving heart is the one orchestrating in harmony the fusion of particles we call reality.

Because maybe that seed which took too much to germinate was just waiting for the winter to be her teacher so that it could bloom its flowers during spring time.

And even if you could not see them,
they would be just beautiful, as are all flowers.

Usually, we forget about the power of small and simple actions. A smile, a compassionate gaze, a gentle gesture. A thank you, a caress, a handshake coming from your heart. To walk together holding hands, a kiss, a slow romantic dance embracing your loved one.

To say “I love you” for the first time.

And for a second, and a third… and for a last time.

One thing I believe is beautiful about these small deeds is that they have no room for comparison. For instance, one rarely aims at being the best “hugger”, or the best “smiler”. In fact, love knows nothing about comparison and it is through our small and simple actions that we allow ourselves to experience love each day. Yet, we do not seem to be aware of the great power behind such simplicity.

Thérèse de Licieux said “Love is made of small deeds”

To finish this post, I want to share Patricia Kaminsky’s affirmation of Buttercup (Ranunculus Occidentalis), a flower essence used for cases when self-value appears broken due to a tendency for comparison with others:

“My quiet, small deeds can contribute to World-Good.
I acknowledge the unique Light within me.
In grace and simplicity, I Light the World.”

I do not want to be a greenhouse flower. I do not want artificial light nor walls protecting me from the wind, nor a watering system that nourishes my roots always on time. I do not want certainties nor perfect petals in a supermarket.

I want life with harshness and laughter, I want loves with risks and falls and that no one cuts the thorns of my stem as not only in my roses they shall find beauty.

May the atmosphere penetrate with her rain the soil wherein my seed trustfully awaits, so I can learn how to open my eyes within the darkness.

May the sun project the strength of its light on my being, for I can learn the meaning of a warmth gesture.

May the wind caress me and sometimes even shake me, so I can understand the wisdom of my roots and the bravery of my branches.

I want to be the one who reveals my colors and tells the universe my secrets, so I can talk about triumphs and lost battles, about love and deception, about abandonment and smiles coming straight from the bottom of my heart: that seed that once travelled from flower to womb of earth, trusting her way back to light to transform into new flower.

There are no common places, we simply lose the ability to admire what we have visited repeatedly. There are no empty words, but hearts tired of beating without any echoing. Ordinary is an illusion of those who have lost the capacity to be surprised, of those who have forgotten magic.

Behind any feeling of tiredness there is deception, the wound that bleeds every time someone lets us down so we end up not believing again either in that person or that situation. We start saying that every person is the same, that we don’t believe in love, that things are useless, that society is doomed and that there is no future, among other bitter phrases.

I am not saying we should stay in the same place forever. We can always chose to step out of a relationship, to end a friendship, to quit a job or keep a healthy distance from a relative because we chose to be faithful to ourselves. However, all the former do not imply stop believing in the others: everybody can change.

Everybody.

It is not about the path you choose. Magic does not know about ways of certainty nor about manuals with precise instructions. The greatest strength of magic is called faith and it consists of never stop believing in oneself and others. Above all, in its core, faith is about believing in life as it is, with its lessons and surprises, ups and downs, with the absolute uncertainty that you will never know what the next day will bring to you.

The featured image in this post is the Green Cross Gentian (Frasera speciosa), whose flower essence help us align with the living forces of Earth and strengthen our faith in humanity. I took this picture a few weeks ago while walking on the top of the Sierra of Coahuila in Mexico. Here is the affirmation written by Patricia Kaminsky about this amazing and regenerating flower essence:

” I have Faith for the future of Earth and all her peoples.I send healing to the Four Directions of Earth’s Body.I carry the Cross of Earth despite change and challenge.My love for Earth and all humanity fills me with Spirit-Force. ”

Idealizing our partner is more related with covering uncomfortable emotions than with the search for perfection. By not being conscious about our own shadow we seek for engaging with self-invented characters that we impose onto other humans. The aim of this is to unconsciously get away from our own pain, sadness, ire and any emotion that is difficult to bring out to surface as it has been confined into our most profound caves.

The greater the pain, the deeper the confinement. It is then more feasible to pretend the feelings are not there. Of course, with the help of the character we built, such endeavor is easier. “He is never going to leave me”, says the adult whom still cries the death or the abandonment of one of her parents; “he needs me so much, he’s been through lots of suffering and my love is going to change him”, thinks the wife who is repeating learned patterns from her martyr mother figure; “I can’t live without her”, murmurs the inner child of a man who was overprotected. The list continues endlessly.

This is why it is primordial for us to become conscious about the origin of the “bad” emotions that keep knocking at our doors. In fact, no emotion should be labeled as good or bad: they simply search for a space inside of us so that they can be embraced by our love. Only by opening up to all emotions will the light of consciousness allow us to see them as they REALLY are. It is then when we stop trying to replace pain for strength, sadness for joy and ire for peace. Instead, acceptance to what is occurs and we let go, magic happens and a true transformation takes place.

Idealizing our partner means idealizing the emotions we are unfamiliar with. By closing our doors to the uncomfortable we supress the chance to know our true essence.

Sometimes I imagine the act of flourishing as the moment when the plant gets to know herself so deeply that the only gesture she is capable of is to show her true essence with the world by inevitably sharing all the light she has let in.